Well, perhaps nothing… but perhaps it’s all worth saying again in one place!

OmniOutliner now comes in two editions: Pro and Essentials. The Pro edition has all the power that we’ve always brought to OmniOutliner, with support for multiple columns, attachments, focus, automation, and so on—and for version 5 we’ve added even more, with advanced filtering, word count, typewriter mode, customizable keyboard shortcuts, and so on. (See the release notes for details!)

For the new Essentials edition, our goal was to introduce the joys and benefits of outlining to a much broader audience than our core Pro customers. Our focus for this edition was on making OmniOutliner much simpler, and much more affordable.

As I said in the blog post which introduced Essentials in February:

With that background, I’d like to introduce you to OmniOutliner Essentials: a svelte, focused, and extremely affordable outlining app. In OmniOutliner’s new Essentials edition, your entire focus is on your own content: there are no distracting sidebars or panels. You can choose to work in a window or in a distraction-free full-screen mode, selecting from a set of beautiful built-in themes. As you write, you’ll be able to see some key statistics about your content so you can track progress towards your goals. But our goal is to help you focus on your content and whatever task you’re working on—not on the tool you’re using.

With the Essentials edition, we’ve lowered OmniOutliner’s entry price from $49.99 to an extremely affordable $9.99. And since we want our upgrade price from Essentials to Pro to be $49.99, the new list price for Pro has been lowered to $59.99:

As I said before, anyone who upgrades from any previous version of OmniOutliner (even those free copies Apple bundled with all those Macs a decade ago) is eligible for a 50% discount—so you can upgrade to the new Essentials edition for $4.99, or to the new Pro edition for just $29.99. And anyone who purchased OmniOutliner Standard within the last few months will get a free upgrade to OmniOutliner 5 Pro. (If you purchased directly from us, please check your email!)

Thank you all for your support through the years. And welcome to OmniOutliner 5!

With OmniGraffle 7.3, available now, we’ve added the ability to present your artboards in Presentation Mode. (Plus panning and zooming!)

OmniGraffle’s Presentation Mode has always allowed you to treat each canvas like a slide to showcase them full screen—now you can present individual artboards, too. Presenting your individual designs, isolated from your busy canvas with artboards, only show your content within each boundary shape and above it in your layer hierarchy.

To start a presentation, use the item in the View menu. When presenting, the up and down arrow keys move between canvases while the left and right arrow keys move between artboards. (And, of course, you can use both!) To help with navigation, we’ve simplified the sidebar to minimize accidental clicks—just move the cursor all the way to the left.

OmniGraffle fits your content to the presentation display by default, but in 7.3 you can zoom yourself using gestures, keyboard shortcuts, the View menu, and the zoom tool (hold z to activate). If you’d rather have your zooms defined and prepared ahead of time, try using an artboard. Create an artboard object around the specific area you want to have focus—OmniGraffle takes care of the rest. Your presentation begins with the whole canvas; when you’re ready to cycle through artboards, select it from the sidebar.

Check out the release notes for a full list of improvements—a lot of time went into this release! The next time you’re showcasing work to a client or revising it with a co-worker, OmniGraffle 7.3 with Artboard Presentation Mode is all set for it.

Earlier this morning we submitted OmniGraffle 3 for iOS to Apple for TestFlight approval. In it, of course, is a whole lot of work: we’ve made several big decisions that we think make OmniGraffle even easier, faster, and more powerful to use on iPad and iPhone.

At the core of OmniGraffle are several major concepts users need quick access to: objects, groups, layers, artboards, and canvases. We’ve switched away from popovers and over to flexible sidebars in OmniGraffle 3. You can toggle the sidebar off or on depending on how you’re working, and what you’re working with, so that moving from object to object to make minor changes is much faster than before—less taps to get to the popover, to close it, etc. (And you can select multiple objects, too!)

That’s on the left. The sidebar on the right contains your usual Inspector gadgets. And, again, we’ve made some decisions to give you the most common settings at the top…with the ability to get into the nitty gritty just below it. On devices where sticking sidebars to either edge will completely hide your canvas, they’ll switch back to a popover.

We’ve gotten even closer to parity with OmniGraffle for Mac, too: Artboards, converting text to shapes, the Infinite Canvas, and more, are all set for testing.

The Infinite Canvas is also a part of what we’re calling Canvas Modes. Something we’re trying—and we hope it works!—is making the distinction between fixed-size canvases, auto-expanding (when needed) canvases, and infinite canvases. We’re hoping to bring the same concept to the Mac, too.

The Tool Palette moves freely, too—mostly. It can be oriented either vertically or horizontally in each of the workspace’s four corners.

And there’s more! This is the first release that includes the groundwork for automation. It’s exactly like writing JavaScript—we’re using Apple’s JavaScriptCore framework on both Mac and iOS. As we wrote aboutearlier, we’ve enlisted Sal Saghoian to put it through its paces. You can learn more about Automation in OmniGraffle over at the website he’s been working on.

Help us test

So, you can help if you’d like! If you use OmniGraffle 2 already, think you could make use of OmniGraffle 3, or just really like testing software, we’d love it if you could help. You can check out the preview page to learn more about the new features, and sign up for our TestFlight.

Over the course of this public test, we’re looking for much of the same feedback we did during the OmniGraffle 7 for Mac test period: How does OmniGraffle accelerate or decelerate your workflows? What could be better? What do you like, but think we should come at from a different angle?

Discounts & Free Upgrades

In Ken’s Looking Ahead post, we shared that from January 24th on, all users purchasing OmniGraffle 2 will get a free upgrade to OmniGraffle 3. For customers that have purchased any version of OmniGraffle 2 before that, appropriate discounts will show up when look—just make sure OmniGraffle 2 for iOS is still installed on that device. Coming soon!

I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

Steve’s notion of a bicycle for our minds—a tool which we can leverage to dramatically increase our mental effectiveness—inspires us to build the apps we build here at Omni. Computers can only empower us to do whatever they’ve been programmed to do, so as developers of productivity apps it’s our role to design and build apps that empower our customers.

While all of our apps share this common goal, the way in which our apps empower customers are easier to explain for some apps than others. OmniGraffle helps communicate ideas visually. OmniPlan helps schedule complex projects. OmniFocus helps manage your personal tasks. And OmniOutliner helps you… well… outline things.

In many ways, OmniOutliner is the single app of ours that comes the closest to Steve’s vision of a “bicycle of the mind.” But in much the same way that it wasn’t always easy to explain the value of computers to people in the late ’80s, it can be difficult to explain the value of OmniOutliner to people who have never had the experience of working with a really great outlining app. We can talk about specific ways customers have used OmniOutliner, of course: to organize their class notes, write technical books, track characters in works of fiction, write screenplays for movies, track budgets and expenses, and organize doctoral theses. But a list of examples misses the point: OmniOutliner is a general-purpose tool which helps you think. It’s the app I turn to whenever I need to capture a bunch of chaotic, abstract thoughts and put them together in an organized, coherent whole.

So when we started thinking about the direction of OmniOutliner 5 for Mac, the problem of helping people discover and understand the benefits of an outlining tool was very much on our minds. And, naturally, we started thinking back over OmniOutliner’s long history. We shipped the first beta of OmniOutliner while Mac OS X was still in beta, and doing so introduced us to a passionate community of outliners who had been using great outlining tools like MORE for over a decade. In response to all their feedback and requests, we quickly iterated with version 2—and it was around this time that Phil Schiller discovered OmniOutliner, leading to Apple paying us to bundle OmniOutliner 3 with every Mac as Apple made the transition from PowerPC to Intel. With Apple shipping millions of Macs a year, this introduced OmniOutliner to a much broader audience—large enough that for many years after Apple launched iWork and stopped bundling third-party apps, we still had more people actively using the bundled copy of OmniOutliner than any of our other apps.

But it’s been another decade, and over time that huge audience of Apple customers using the bundled OmniOutliner has waned, even as the size of the entire Apple market has grown dramatically. I find more and more that our potential customers on Mac and iOS don’t really know what an outlining app is or why they might want to buy one.

Which brings me back to planning the direction of OmniOutliner 5. The direction of the Pro edition (currently in public test) was the easy part of this—for that, we simply needed to look at what our core Pro audience was telling us they needed: advanced filtering, word count, typewriter mode, and so on.

But our goals for OmniOutliner 5 were much more ambitious than that. We didn’t want to just reach out to our existing audience; we wanted to introduce the joys and benefits of outlining to a much larger audience. We decided that meant two things: we needed to make the app much simpler, and we needed to make it much more affordable.

So! With that background, I’d like to introduce you to OmniOutliner Essentials: a svelte, focused, and extremely affordable outlining app. In OmniOutliner’s new Essentials edition, your entire focus is on your own content: there are no distracting sidebars or panels. You can choose to work in a window or in a distraction-free full-screen mode, selecting from a set of beautiful built-in themes. As you write, you’ll be able to see some key statistics about your content so you can track progress towards your goals. But our goal is to help you focus on your content and whatever task you’re working on—not on the tool you’re using.

With the Essentials edition, we’ve lowered OmniOutliner’s entry price from $49.99 to an extremely affordable $9.99. And since we want our upgrade price from Essentials to Pro to be $49.99, the new list price for Pro has been lowered to $59.99:

Since OmniOutliner Essentials replaces the old Standard edition, we’ll be giving anyone who purchased Standard within the past few months a free automatic upgrade to OmniOutliner 5 Pro. And anyone who upgrades from any previous version of OmniOutliner (even those free copies Apple bundled with all those Macs a decade ago) will be eligible for a 50% discount—so you’ll be able to upgrade to the new Essentials edition for $4.99, or to the new Pro edition for just $29.99.

OmniOutliner Essentials will be available in Public Test starting today, and we’re very interested in any feedback you might have—especially from those of you who may be trying an outlining app for the first time. You can learn more and download the app here, and when you’re running the app you can choose Contact Omni from the Help menu to send email to our support humans.

I’m incredibly proud of all the work our team has done on both the Pro and Essentials editions of OmniOutliner 5, and I look forward to introducing a whole new generation to outlining!

(Feedback on this post? I’d love to hear from you! You can find me on twitter at @kcase, or send me email at kc@omnigroup.com.)

P.S. — Yes, OmniOutliner Essentials will be coming to iOS (when we ship version 3 later this year). And yes, it supports document syncing.

Welcome! Each year, I like to take a little time to pause and reflect on the past year’s accomplishments, and to try to peer ahead at what I expect we will be delivering over the coming year. The future is never certain, of course! But I think it’s important to talk about where we are now and where we think we’re headed.

2017 is an anniversary year for the Omni Group! We’ll be turning 25 years old in September—which means Omni is now slightly older than any of us were back when we started the company. We’ve seen a lot of changes in our industry over those 25 years, but one of the things that has remained constant is our passion for empowering our customers by building great software and offering great support—all done with care, from our offices here in Seattle.

Looking Back at 2016

Looking back at our accomplishments in 2016, there are two big events that stand out in my mind. The first is that we shipped OmniGraffle 7, implementing some of the features most requested by our customers. The second is that we switched to an extensible and encrypted sync format in OmniFocus, which makes it possible for us to revisit some of the design decisions in the data model from lessons learned since we first built OmniFocus back in 2007.

OmniGraffle 7 for Mac

There’s a lot to say about OmniGraffle 7 and I don’t want to overwhelm this post, but I think it’s worth quickly noting that version 7 implements many of the most frequently requested features our customers have asked us for over the years. This includes a number of big features like SVG import (you can paste raw SVG source text onto the canvas and it will turn into native OmniGraffle shapes), custom keyboard shortcuts (with built-in sets for “Adobe” and “Sketch” to make life easier for people who frequently switch between apps), converting text to shapes (preserving the outlines of the text from whatever font you were using), canvas autosizing in all directions (rather than just down and right), and artboards (for easily managing groups of items on a canvas).

But even beyond those big features, one of the great things about OmniGraffle 7 is that it also includes lots of little touches of polish that make common actions just a little better—things like renaming objects by double-clicking in the sidebar, suppressing the selection highlight by holding Command while dragging, and quickly measuring the distance between two shapes by clicking on one and holding Option while mousing over another. (We even restored the visibility of the “Save As” menu item so it’s no longer hidden behind the Option key.)

Again, there’s a lot more I could say about OmniGraffle 7, but rather than overwhelming this post with information about OmniGraffle 7 let me just suggest you check out our new Inside OmniGraffle website.

Improvements to OmniGraffle’s Free Stenciltown Service

Version 7 wasn’t the only big update for OmniGraffle customers last year. With a major update to our free Stenciltown service, we made it easier than ever to share stencils with the rest of the community, submitting them to Stenciltown right from the app on both Mac and iOS. (In fact all of our iOS apps now have a Share button in the toolbar, making it easy to share whatever you’re currently working on with others.)

OmniFocus 2 updates

The OmniFocus team has also been busy this past year, adding support for custom font and color choices on Mac (including dark mode), adding “peek” and “pop” 3D Touch gestures on iOS, and switching to an encrypted sync format that means that someone who has physical access to your sync data is no longer able to read it unless they also know the passphrase you’ve used to encrypt it. We’ve made it as easy to automate project creation on iOS as on Mac (some would say it’s even easier), added “New Inbox Item” and expandability to our Today widget, and rewrote our Apple Watch app for much-improved performance and support for flipping between home screen tiles using the Digital Crown. And finally (if you’ll allow me to count releases which were created in 2016 but shipped in the first few days of 2017) we’ve made it as easy to do global searches on Mac as it is on iOS.

OmniPlan 3 for iOS

In February we shipped OmniPlan 3 for iOS, with its network diagram view, Monte Carlo simulations, and support for working with project plans created by Microsoft Project 2016. OmniPlan has been very popular, with an average rating of 4.5 stars. (Thank you!) We’ve also added App Lock to OmniPlan, so you can protect it behind a password or TouchID.

Where We Diverged From Our Plans

As you can see, we accomplished most of the items from the 2016 roadmap we’d planned at the beginning of the year—but plans never completely match up with reality, and I think it’s worth noting a few places where we diverged. We looked at implementing Markdown support for the upcoming OmniOutliner 5, but early feedback indicated that everyone had different expectations for what it would do so we ended up putting those plans on hold. (We’d still love to do it if we can find enough common expectations to make it worth doing. Please email us with yours!) We also wanted to deliver encryption of all documents stored on the Omni Sync Server—but while we’ve made a start on that by encrypting data from OmniFocus, we still have more work to do to deliver encryption support in our other apps.

In Q4, Apple surprised us all with their introduction of the Touch Bar in the new MacBook Pro, and we quickly saw an opportunity to use that Touch Bar to help people make better use of our apps. With OmniGraffle 7.2 we added Touch Bar support for creating and editing shapes, and with OmniPlan 3.6 we added Touch Bar support for navigating your Gantt chart with dynamic scrubbing.

Wrapping up the year, we were incredibly honored to learn that our apps made Apple’s “Best of …” list for the third year running! The trend started with OmniFocus for Mac and OmniFocus for iPad being honored as Best of 2014; then OmniPlan for Mac and OmniFocus for Apple Watch made Best of 2015; and this year we made Apple’s Best of 2016 list with OmniGraffle 7 for Mac and OmniPlan 3 for iPad. We couldn’t have done this without our wonderful customers, so thanks to all of you for your amazing support through the years!

Looking Ahead at 2017

As we turn to looking at the year ahead, let me start by confirming or reiterating a few obvious directions that many careful readers have probably already guessed (or already know) that we’re planning for 2017:

We’ll be shipping OmniGraffle 3 for iOS, which will add support for the latest features shipped in OmniGraffle 7 for Mac such as SVG import and artboards. (Anyone who purchases OmniGraffle 2 today will receive a free upgrade to version 3 when it ships.)

We’ll be shipping OmniOutliner 5 for Mac early in the year, with advanced filtering options and a distraction-free full-screen mode. We’ll be following that up later in the year by bringing those advanced filtering options to OmniOutliner 3 for iOS. (Anyone who purchases OmniOutliner today—for Mac or iOS—will receive a free upgrade to the next major version when it ships.)

OmniFocus in 2017

This summer, OmniFocus will be ten years old. We’ve improved a lot of things about the app over those ten years, but to maintain file format compatibility there are some things about the way we work with the app that haven’t ever changed. Last year we laid the groundwork for finally changing some of those, when we switched to a new, extensible file format and added encryption. This year, we’re going to make some fundamental improvements to the data OmniFocus keeps track of. Based on your feedback, the database changes currently at the top of our list are:

Faster syncing of databases with large attachments (so people who use lots of large attachments no longer have their sync times get longer and longer)

Support for multiple tags on tasks and projects (rather than just a single context)

More flexible repeats and notifications (such as “third Thursday of the month” and “keep reminding me every ten minutes until I check this off”)

You can see already that it’s going to be a busy year! But wait, there’s more…

Bringing the Power of the Desktop to that Transforming Piece of Glass

Finally, we’re working hard on making iPad Pro the best platform it can be. When Tim Cook introduced iPad Pro in September, he said: “iPad is the clearest expression of our vision of the future of personal computing: a simple, multi-touch piece of glass that instantly transforms into virtually anything that you want it to be.” I still find that vision as compelling as when we decided to go “iPad or Bust!” when iPad was introduced in 2010, and if we truly want to achieve that vision we still have a lot of work to do to bring more of the power of the desktop to that transforming piece of glass. I can’t wait to share the fruits of that labor with you once it’s ready!

At that point we’d already done some great work for iPad Pro, introducing freehand drawing of shapes with an Apple Pencil in OmniGraffle, making sure all of our apps adapt well to its larger screen, and adding keyboard shortcuts to our apps to support the new Apple Keyboard. And shortly after that blog post we also shipped OmniPlan 3 for iOS, which was very well-received—making the App Store’s Best of 2016. But when I said we still have a lot of work to do, none of those are what I was talking about.

Now, perhaps I should take a step back. iPad is already a very powerful and productive tool. I use mine every day, replacing the steno pads I used to carry everywhere with my iPad Pro and a few Apple Pencils. (I’m dependent enough on Apple Pencil at this point that I always carry more than one with me just to be safe.) And in their current incarnation, I’m also quite aware that they also have some pretty hard limits: they’re not going to replace my Mac, where I currently have dozens of windows open as I research and write. What I really mean to say is that our apps have just begun to tap into the iPad’s power, and that there’s a lot of opportunity to bring more of the power of our desktop apps to iPad by improving our iPad apps:

One of the ways in which we can do that is to improve the way we interact with the apps to have a more efficient user experience. For example, we can make better use of iPad Pro’s larger screen by replacing some of the popovers in our interface with slide-in panels on the left and right (as in the screenshot above), so you don’t have to keep opening and closing them every time you want to use them. (This will debut later this year in OmniGraffle 3 and OmniOutliner 3 for iOS.)

In OmniFocus for iOS, we can make it easier to see the information you care about while not distracting you with information you don’t care about, as we let you do today on the Mac using custom columns. We can make it possible to select multiple tasks and edit them all at once, as we do in our other iOS apps. And we can make it easier to send information between OmniFocus and our other apps.

Powerful iOS automation

But there’s an even more fundamental way we can bring an efficient desktop-class experience to our iOS apps, and that’s by enabling a completely different model of interaction altogether. One of the most important features that we’ve built into our Mac apps has been user automation, which our customers have leveraged to build great custom solutions for themselves that we would never have anticipated. Solutions which add project templates to OmniFocus, or capture your Safari tab list to your Inbox.

In 2016 we scratched the surface with URL automation on iOS, but in 2017 we plan to roll out user automation on iOS in a big way across all our apps with a much richer set of capabilities. This automation support won’t be limited to a simple set of URL primitives; instead, we’re adding support for running JavaScript code: code that has the same level of deep support for manipulating the data in our apps as we’ve previously exposed to AppleScript.

If there’s any single person who I would identify as the face of user automation on Mac over the past two decades, that person would be Sal Soghoian. Sal joined Apple in 1997 to serve as the product manager of automation technologies, and through these past 20 years Sal has been instrumental in making sure that those technologies continue to evolve to help computers serve the needs of humans rather than the other way around.

Right before the holidays I approached Sal to review the automation work we’ve been doing, and over the past weeks he’s been enthusiastically exploring the boundaries of what’s already possible as well as helping us see what else we need to build before shipping this. He offered that I could share a simple example he created demonstrating this automation in action:

Now, this is just a simple example: a four-line script which places a green circle on an OmniGraffle canvas. But it’s easy to imagine taking this further. Creating a schema diagram of a SQL database. Building an org chart from a phone directory. Graphing servers in your local network. Or counting how many objects of a particular type are on a canvas (like the one JTech Communications built for AppleScript).

And all of the above are just examples of one type of automation, the type you actively invoke when you want to do something. We’re also adding support for background scripts which can automatically respond to document edits. For example, you could build an OmniGraffle handler script which responds to a resizing artboard by automatically adjusting the layout of all the shapes on that artboard. Or one which automatically updates the area markers on a floor plan. In OmniOutliner, you could make a handler script which automatically adds the values from two columns to produce a third column. Or which turns a row red when its balance column goes negative. Or even a mortgage calculator. And many of these scripts will be able to work exactly the same on both Mac and iOS.

Oh, and did I mention that we’re including support for calling out to other apps by their URL handler? So you’ll be able to tie into the Workflow app and its already great ecosystem of automation. In OmniFocus, imagine the possibilities that open up when you can trigger a workflow just by checking something off!

So that’s a peek at what’s coming from Omni in our 25th year. We already have some great apps, and iPad is already a great productivity platform—but, together, I think we can make the apps and platform even better. I can’t wait to see what you all build using powerful iOS automation!

(Feedback? I’d love to hear from you! You can find me on twitter at @kcase, or send me email at kc@omnigroup.com.)